Although the subject which I wish to raise, the shortage of points goods, may sound a little critical and unfriendly, I want to begin by assuring the hon. Lady that I have not come here this afternoon to take up her time and the time of the House by throwing out irresponsible and unco-ordinated complaints about the shortage of this and that. I fully appreciate the difficulties under which her Ministry is working, and I believe, in view of the world problems with which it has had to deal, that the Ministry has done an efficient and imaginative job on behalf of the consuming public of Great Britain. It is on the content of those difficulties that I wish to speak. In return I do ask the hon. Lady not to ride away from my questions and my case on a mournful reiteration of the refrain of "no dollars." After all, Marshall Aid is now a reality. Dollar goods are coming in, either as a result of direct shipment or offshore purchases, and the House is entitled to examine the position and see what the effect will be on our standard of life and how those dollars should be spent.

Last Autumn when the dollar crisis broke, we all of us frankly expected a belt-tightening period during the winter months. I, personally, thought we should be up against a food stringency very much worse than we had had at any time before. But thanks to the Argentine Agreement and Canadian generosity, and presumably thanks also to the stocks of points goods held in this country, last Winter we did not do so badly at all, and our supply of points goods was reasonably fair. Unsweetened evaporated milk, for example, that great standby of every housewife, was still to be obtained at two points a tin and there was no great shortage of dried eggs, baked beans or other protein goods which are invaluable to the woman who has to plan savoury and nourishing meals for her men folk.

But it was during the summer months that our points crisis really broke. We have had a lot of questions in this House during the past week about the shortages of points goods in rural areas, but I can assure the hon. Lady that this situation was pretty general throughout the country. It was not only in rural districts that the housewife found at the end of her points period that she had very great difficulty in disposing of her points at all because she could not get in the shop the things she wanted to buy. I personally more than once, on those last fatal hours of the last day of a points period, have been driven to accept tapioca and treacle when I had not even enough milk to make a pudding. The alternative would have been a tin of imported grapefruit marmalade—very attractive no doubt, but hardly a substantial meal for a hungry man when he comes home from work.

We did not worry even then, because we knew that there would have to be a time-lag before Marshall Aid could make itself felt in our larders. We know perfectly well that the protein goods—and it is to them that I refer particularly—the baked beans, canned fish and canned meats, and so on—largely come from the United States, Canada and the Argentine and need dollars to buy them. Therefore, we knew that it would be some time before they would reappear in the shops.

What I want to get clear this afternoon, and what I want to take up particularly with the hon. Lady, is the question of what is the effect now on our diet of Marshall Aid shipments. I am very strongly under the impression, both from my personal experience as a shopper and from studying the Trade and Navigation Returns, that this Winter we shall be more short of protein foods than we were last Winter when the dollar crisis was supposed to be upon us in all its full effect. I ask the hon. Lady whether I am correct in that assumption? It is true that the complete famine of protein goods has now been checked to some extent. For example, we can now get the unsweetened evaporated milk once again in the shops but the points price of that milk has doubled. We have to pay four points instead of two. My experience is that baked beans are still in very short supply, canned salmon is totally unobtainable and, as for canned meats it takes a prince's ransom in points to buy a tin even if one is lucky enough to find one.

I was shopping the other day and when the shopkeeper offered me a comparatively small tin of pork ham, or something of the sort of the spam variety, I felt like Christopher Columbus discovering America. But I had rather a shock when I discovered that out of my personal monthly allocation of 24 points that comparatively small tin would cost me 27. As there are only two points books in my family, I leave it to the hon. Lady's generous and vivid imagination to imagine the state of our diet for the rest of the month.

I do not want merely to argue personally about this matter, and I have gone to some trouble to try to examine import figures from the Trade and Navigation Returns. I want the hon. Lady to correct me if I am wrong when I say that they seem to show two things. They appear to show not only that our imports of these protein points goods during the first eight months of 1948 were considerably less than they were in the first eight months of 1947 but—and this is the significant thing—that the imports for last month, August, 1948, are only a fraction of the import figures for August, 1947. That appears to me to demonstrate that Marshall Aid means to this country that there will be no restoration over a large section of our food front of our predollar-crisis level of consumption. This is a serious point which we shall feel more sharply as the Winter advances.

Let me give the hon. Lady one or two examples. If we take tinned meats, for instance, on which housewives count so much as a supplementation of their meat ration—tinned beef in various forms, ox tongue, corned beef and so on—we find that the imports of these commodities for the first eight months of this year were less than one-third of the imports for the corresponding period of last year. What is more, the latest monthly rate, that for August this year, is lower than the monthly rate for the first eight months of the year. In other words, the import rate is actually going down.